Lev Roitman, Former RFE/RL Russian Service Journalist And Commentator

Lev Roitman, former RFE/RL Russian Service journalist and commentator.

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Lev Roitman, Former RFE/RL Russian Service Journalist And Commentator

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Journalist, publisher, and lawyer Lev Roitman, a long-time employee of RFE/RL’s Russian Service, known as Radio Liberty, has died in Prague at the age of 76.

Roitman, born in Yerevan in 1943, graduated from the Law Faculty of Kyiv University and worked as a lawyer. He left the Soviet Union in 1973, and worked as a commentator for Radio Liberty in New York, Munich, and Prague, hosting radio programs. His signature programs were “Lawyer’s Notes,” “The Soviet Union: Affairs, Problems, And Judgments,” “Facts And Opinions,” and “Commentators At The Round Table.”

During his years in Munich, Roitman founded The Roitman Verlag Publishing House, which produced German translations of such Russian authors as Sergei Yuryenen, Yulia Voznesenskaya, and Mikhail Epstein. He co-authored the book Sakhalin: Order To Kill, a journalistic investigation of the airline disaster in 1983 when Soviet air defenses shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 en route from New York to Seoul via Anchorage, Alaska.